Takeover

Continue someone else's open PR in a replacement PR when the user asks: usually because babysit cannot push to the contributor's branch, or the contributor has stopped responding. The original contributors keep their credit, and the original PR stays open unless the user permits closing it.

Result: an open replacement PR under watch whose history carries the original commits with their authors, plus babysit's own changes as separate commits. Safe failure direction: when the source cannot be fetched or credit cannot be carried, stop and report rather than open an uncredited replacement.

Take over only on the user's request in an interactive run, and only from an open source PR.

1. Assess first. Run the assessment and verdict in references/intake.md on the source PR. A Close verdict ends the takeover with that evidence. Update and Rework continue here instead of stopping; with Rework, the replacement carries the described rework.
2. Branch from the source. Create the replacement branch from the source head OID fetched from refs/pull/<N>/head, never a local ref, so every original commit keeps its author. Make your own changes as separate commits.
3. Update it before it is pushed: rebase the replacement branch onto the fresh base and apply the comparison rules in steps 2-4 of the verified update in references/intake.md. No one else has this branch yet, so the stack, dependent-PR, and lease rules do not apply. Nothing in a takeover touches the source branch.
4. Recheck the source for new commits or feedback since you started. Read each new commit the way the assessment read the original series before carrying it over, and fold feedback that still applies into your own changes. Record the source head SHA you finished from.
5. Confirm before the first push when the source is a fork, or when any carried commit changes CI workflows or code CI runs. Pushing the replacement to this repository runs that code with the repository's secrets and without GitHub's fork-PR approval gate, so say so and push only after the user confirms.
6. Open the replacement through ce-commit-push-pr mode:pipeline, passing the source PR URL and the original commit authors (from the source PR's commits) as credit context for the description. Pipeline mode skips ce-commit-push-pr's own handoff to babysit, so this run stays the only watcher. The replacement targets the source PR's base branch and keeps its draft state; when it opened otherwise, correct it (gh pr edit "<new-N>" --repo "<[host/]owner/repo>" --base "<source-baseRefName>", gh pr ready "<new-N>" --repo "<[host/]owner/repo>" --undo) before watching.
7. Watch the replacement. When this run already took its first snapshot (a takeover requested mid-watch), stop that watcher and continue the invocation on the new PR the way a stack transition does (references/setup.md): --continue-invocation with the recorded invocation id, start time, and budget, and the posture re-stated. Otherwise no invocation exists yet: start the new PR's first snapshot as references/tick.md describes.

Never close the source PR without the user's explicit permission. The report names the source PR, its head SHA at handoff, the replacement PR, and how credit was carried.